Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Behind The Screen Again

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to the Obsidian Portal page for my next game - a Traveller game that existed so that someone I hadn't gamed with in more than a decade could acclimatize to my current preferred style of play (along with the group that is already familiar with that style). And so the group could familiarize themselves with Obsidian Portal itself.

Well, for one reason and another, that game fell apart before it even started.

Since Traveller was going to be a short game anyhow, we're leading directly into the game which most of the people were interested in from the get-go.

How interested are they? There are a total of four households involved with the game. Three of us have copies of at least the core book.

The game itself tends, in some circles, to be a bit controversial. And by "in some circles," I mean "over on the RPG.net forums." And, to be honest, there is good reason for the game to be a bit controversial. Mind you, I think that a number of better-known games should be more controversial. But that's just me.

Either way, the occasional discussion has highlighted a couple of possible system issues for me to watch out for. For example, because of how the dice work, it's possible to critically succeed and critically fail the same roll. And the balance between Integrity Scale and Vitality Scale is reportedly ... off. I'll tweak that if it comes up. At this point, however, I don't expect it to come up.

Now that I've said, that, however, my players will take it on themselves to track down an armored brigade single-handedly with their hand weapons.

Either way, I've put up an Obsidian Portal page for the players. I'll be rewarding players with drama points and XP for updating. At least one player is really good for bouncing ideas off of, and I'll be rewarding him for that, too, even if he doesn't update the Portal at all.

Since four of my players are authors, I expect to see some ... interesting ... characters. Even for a law enforcement-themed campaign.

For my part, this will be my first campaign since my L5R game that ran from 1996 until early 2000. I've enjoyed the one-shots we did (including the Cthulhutech one-shot I did a few years back), so it'll be good to be back behind the screen long-term.

Well, ideally. Assuming the game comes together and then holds together.

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